“The tide rises, the tide falls, / The twilight darkens, the curlew calls”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a poet whose stellar reputation of the late 19th and early 20th Century is rather in eclipse, to say the least. No doubt his star will…
Author: Séamus Sweeney
#AprilCountry – April 21st, “Amazing Grace”, Loretta Lynn
For Easter Sunday, here is Loretta Lynn – born a month and a day before my own father – with “Amazing Grace”
#AprilCountry, “Satan is Real”, The Louvin Brothers
It would be easy to mock the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan Is Real”, with its lurid and rather literal cover. Easy that is, until you listen to a song of evident…
“When I landed in the republic of conscience / it was so noiseless when the engines stopped./ I could hear a curlew high above the runway.”
From the Republic of Conscience was written by Seamus Heaney in 1985 at the request of Mary Lawlor, then head of Amnesty International in Ireland. While I find it perhaps…
“Curlew Call”, Peter Bagshaw
The call of the curlew is its best known feature – indeed, the potential disappearance of this sound from the soundscape of the countryside is one of the most potent…
“Mars Ever Nearer”, John Jay Speredakos – Chaleuer Magazine
I liked this poem by John Jay Speredakos of the recurrent violent reciprocity of conflict and war. Mars Ever Nearer Twenty millennia ago when we made spears, we did…
#AprilCountry #GoodFriday , The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea, The Louvin Brothers
They weren’t the Louvin Brothers, but unlike The Walker Brothers, they were actually brothers – Ira and Charlie Loudermilk. Charlie died in 2011, while Ira died in 1965 in a…
Séamus Sweeney 